XBMC 11 Eden available for download, LiveCD version

XBMC, the popular media centre software for PCs has reached its next major milestone. XBMC, for those who don’t know is used by many who have HTPCs connected to TVs .The latest version 11, codenamed Eden is finally out after a long wait. There were two major release candidates released before the final release. There are a whole bunch of feature updates and fixes put into the new version. There are improvements made to the JPEG decoder and Blu-ray playback is also enhanced. There’s also AirPlay support like it already supports DLNA. XBMC has a weather report feature which has also been updated which now detects the IP and detects your location-based on your IP. There have also been interface tweaks - especially to the Confluence skin.

XBMC Eden out now

There are some other neat features as well, in terms of extended hardware support - there’s in-sync support for the Apple TV2, iPad and the other iOS devices. Basically, it’s easier to control your XBMC using these devices. Some other improvements include support for AMD graphics hardware acceleration on Linux. There’s also DXVA support, which means almost all modern graphics solutions can offload video rendering to graphics cards, resulting in much lower CPU consumption.

XBMC 11 Eden is available for download now, for Windows, Linux, OS X and iOS. There’s also a live version available now called XBMCbuntu. Like the name suggests, XBMCbuntu is based on Ubuntu and users will be able to use XBMC by booting off a disc. It’s based on a variant of Ubuntu 11.10. The coders at XBMC have even made the facility to let the user never see the operating system if he wishes. The OS, however has a Chromium browser and a package manager that will allow the user to install programs like you could with any other Linux distribution. XBMC was first known as Xbox Media Center and the development first started back in 2003 and was designed to be a media playback platform for the original Xbox gaming console..